I’ve had the John Ferris book “Behind the Enigma” on my reading pile for a while but hadn’t really been able to get into it, a bit dry and taking some time to actually get started; so when I saw this competitor account in Oxfam I thought I would give it a go. This one I quite enjoyed – it moved at a much better pace and arguably started at a better point in time. I learned a lot from this – especially about incidents from the Cold War that turned out to be a very real conflict for some people, especially spy plane aircrews.
There is even-handed coverage of successes and failures, and an honest appraisal of the damage done by spies, double agents and leakers and a fairly up to date new section on the challenge of cyber crime and the balance between creating hacking tools and defending against them.
Overall a good solid account well worth reading, although it has also taught me that I am a bit of a snobbish book collector as I didn’t deem this rather tatty second-hand volume fit for my permanent collection so it has gone back to Oxfam for another charity purchase…